Mind Bomb

Blancanales was already through and kicking the door shut. “I hope to God these guys aren’t for real!”

Lyons reached for a reload. “I hope you’re right.”

Kurtzman spoke urgently across the link. “They’re pulling stuff out of the vehicles. Looks like long arms! I—”

“Shit!” James fired a burst from his submachine gun out the window and dived for the floor. “Rocket!”

Small arms began crackling and popping outside. Lyons heard the distinctive thud of an RPG launching off its tube and the hiss of the rocket motor igniting. He rolled behind the couch and covered his eyes and jammed his thumbs in his ears. By some miracle the rocket-propelled grenade hit the adobe of the doorjamb rather than the door itself. The house shook and windows shattered.

“Enough of this less-than-lethal shit...” The Able Team leader snapped in a drum loaded with lead.

James bounced up and dropped back down. “Rocket!”

Blancanales dived to put the kitchen between him and the blast. Lyons and James dived for the hall. The grenade hit the front door and it dissolved in an orange flash. Superheated gas and shrapnel expanded to fill the living room as the heat wash rolled through the house. Lyons sat up and yawned against the ringing in his ears. Schwarz spoke from his concealed position. He’d set up a small suite of minicams to watch the house perimeter. “You got twelve guys hitting the front, five more are breaking off and flanking for the back.”

“Copy that, Gadgets. Hold position, wait for the shot. Pol, don’t let ’em in.”

Lyons fired a burst around the hall doorway. About a hundred bullets seemed to bee-swarm back in response. He could hear coughing and ragged shouts in Spanish. Lyons knew a few words and none of it sounded police procedural.

Schwarz spoke again. “Grenade!”

A green metal baseball looped through the blackened, smoking orifice of the front door and clattered to the floor. Lyons snapped back around the hall door as the grenade whip-cracked and lethal metal fragments buzz-sawed everywhere. Bullets began tearing through the front windows.

“They’re on the porch,” Schwarz reported.

“Wait for the shot.”

“They’re at the back door,” Blancanales reported from the kitchen.

Lyons heard the floor vibrate with boots. Schwarz told him what he already knew. “They’re entering the house, front door and front windows.”

“Take them.”

Schwarz cut loose. The two-way observation mirror shattered. Schwarz had a 60-round, quad-stack magazine loaded in his carbine and he held the trigger down. He took the attackers by surprise and from the flank. Schwarz reaped them like wheat.

Calvin James had flown out for an interrogation rather than a firefight, but the ex-SEAL had packed an MP5 submachine gun just in case. He put burst after burst into the men in the windows. Lyons stayed on one knee and leaned around the corner. He had a straight shot at the back door. Blancanales had an angle on it with his carbine-shotgun combo. The door hammered on its hinges, but the nice boys at the Federal Bureau of Investigations had installed decent doors, and anyone pounding on it had to be standing on the narrow stair.

Blancanales nodded at Lyons and burned an 8-round mag of his car-killing ammunition through the wooden portal.

Screaming out back joined the cacophony of screaming and gunfire at the front.

Grimaldi came across the link. “I have you in sight.”

“Copy, Jack,” Lyons responded. “Anything outside is hostile and legit.”

“Commencing gun run.”

“Copy. Everyone down!”

Dragonslayer was currently in civilian camouflage. Part of the facade was a rescue winch mounted over the starboard-side cabin door. The aerodynamic fairing did not house a motorized winch and three hundred feet of cable. It was a facade that contained a six-barrel “six-pack” micro-gun. The mini Gatling gun snarled into life and swept the porch and everyone still on it. Dragonslayer banked in a tight orbit and hosed down the surviving men at the back door.

“Ironman, I have drivers in the vehicles.”

“Disable the trucks.”

“Copy that.” Grimaldi continued his orbit and put a long burst through the hood of each vehicle.

“Gadgets, what do you have on the porch and the living room?”

“All targets are down.”

“Break position and cover the vehicles. Cal, go get Valenzuela. Pol, on me. Sweep and clear.”

Lyons and Blancanales checked the fallen. There wasn’t much to check. Schwarz had an assault rifle with a 60-round mag and the range had been fifteen feet or less. He’d fired high in case the men were wearing concealed armor. The fallen mostly had spaghetti for heads. Calvin James had been more surgical. His targets still averaged 75 percent of their facial features.

Dragonslayer’s PA system thundered like God on High. “You! In the vehicles! Throw out your weapons! Come out with your hands up and lay facedown on the road!”

Calvin came out of the cellar with an unconscious Sofina Valenzuela over his shoulder. Lyons suspected James had tranquilized her so she wouldn’t have to see the slaughterhouse upstairs. Lyons stepped out into the sunshine. The enemy outside had fared little better. Grimaldi’s six-pack fired 3,000 rounds a minute. The weapon was slaved to the pilot’s helmet-mounted sight. It didn’t fire unless he had a lock. Anyone the pilot gave even a one-second burst took fifty rounds.

The annihilation of the enemy was total.

Lyons nodded to himself. Not quite, he had three drivers currently going prone in the road and he was secretly relieved they appeared to be shit-scared as opposed to going into some brain-dead Kamikaze mode.

The Able Team warrior smiled as his boots crunched on the gravel road and he stood over his main quarry. The man lay sprawled on his back gasping. He had taken two CS rounds in the chest and was feebly swatting at the mass of smoldering CS particulate that had scorched the front of his uniform. Lyons made a mental note to buy stock in the company.

“Ibanez! About that little talk you owe me...”

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1492f850-9e07-51ea-9df2-18a85f672171)

Ciudad

Carl Lyons showered off the stink of sweat, gunpowder and CS. All their suspects save Ibanez were in the hospital or in custody. Other than re-invading Mexico, there was very little to do but wait.

Able Team was ensconced in a brand-new, mildly palatial house in a new Laredo suburb. Theirs was the only finished house on the block. The rest of the subdivision had yet to recover from the housing crisis. The Farm had picked it out and it suited Lyons just fine. If the enemy found them here something genuinely spooky was going on. Able had run into spooky before, but in the Ironman’s experience 99 percent of spooky involved ignoring the scary trappings, figuring the angle and then attacking. Lyons followed his nose and took a seat at the kitchen bar. Blancanales handed him a plate of steak rancheros and eggs with enough hot sauce to scar the colon of a normal man.

Lyons took a bite and grunted his appreciation.

His mood took away some of his enjoyment of the food. Lyons had been fighting his war for some time, sometimes in some very strange places under even stranger circumstances. There was that one percentile of spooky that refused to be explained. The Ironman had seen things explainable and otherwise that would haunt him to his grave. He took a meditative sip of his coffee.

He didn’t care for what he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours.

The laptop on the counter chimed. Lyons tapped an icon and Kurtzman popped up. Lyons shoveled down steak. They’d been idle for eight hours. “That was fast.”

“We got a lot of data to crunch still, but we have plenty you want to hear now.”

“What do we have on the khaki lackeys from the ranch house?”

“They’re Zetas.”